LIBRI DI GIUSEPPE SERGIO

Il volume affronta il tema della comunicazione pubblica nell’era digitale e della cittadinanza multiculturale, con particolare attenzione al linguaggio amministrativo in altre lingue, specialmente in inglese, francese, spagnolo, arabo e cinese. Come mostrano i saggi, il tema dell’intermediazione informatica delle informazioni, di eccezionale attualità in tempi di epidemia globale, non si esaurisce nella pur problematica trasmissione di dati, ma presenta risvolti culturali e politici, talvolta preoccupanti, di centrale importanza per le società di oggi.

Il volume esplora le molteplici interconnessioni tra le pratiche discorsive specialistiche e i contesti sociali e culturali nei quali si sviluppano. Gli studi indagano diverse aree linguistico-culturali, con prevalenza del mondo spagnolo e ispanoamericano, ma con una vasta copertura geografica (dall’Europa all’America Latina, all’India e al Giappone) a riprova della convergenza tra i fenomeni oggetto di analisi, sia pure con un’ampia variabilità, determinata dall’incidenza delle culture.

This essay aims at highlighting the language of fashion as presented in «Vogue Italia», which is probably the most important Italian fashion magazine today. After a short history of the magazine, the essay compares two corpora of articles taken from «Vogue Italia»: the first one from the magazine’s first decade (i.e. 1965-1975), the second one from the decade 2002-2012. The comparison points out different textual approaches, going from openly advisory to denotative, and syntactical constructions, in the direction of a terse style. But the essay especially focuses on the fashion lexicon, characterized by words coming from French and, increasingly, from English; by neologisms, which point out the role of «Vogue Italia» in innovating and spreading fashion language; and, finally, by compounds and derivatives, showing the strong but decreasing power of the Italian language to create new technical words.

We propose a new interpretation of objective probability in statistical physics based on physical computational complexity. This notion applies to a single physical system (be it an experimental set-up in the lab, or a subsystem of the universe), and quantifies (1) the difficulty to realize a physical state given another, (2) the ‘distance’ (in terms of physical resources) between a physical state and another, and (3) the size of the set of time-complexity functions that are compatible with the physical resources required to reach a physical state from another. This view (a) exorcises ‘ignorance’ from statistical physics, and (b) underlies a new interpretation to non-relativistic quantum mechanics.